Monday, February 3, 2014

A new reader, Ankush Banerjee, who has a strong
interest in poetry joined us. Many were away at this session, but we heard from
poets across the world: India (4), England (1), Ireland (2), USA (2).

Kavita, KumKum, Esther, Ankush, Preeti (back)

The sadness that pervades the poems of Mamang Dai
from the North-East of India may reflect the undercurrent of violence and loss
of control of common people over their lives. The compensations are reflections
of the permanence of nature and its stoical ability to embrace everything.

Preeti, Sunil, Kavita

This was the second time Yeats was chosen for
reading in our group, and his wonderful meditation on old age and love left us
all with something to look forward to. He underscored another eternal truth: ‘Wine
comes in at the mouth /and love comes in at the eye.’

Thursday Feb 20, 2014 is the date for reading An Equal Music by Vikram Seth and Fri
Mar 28, 2014 for Oscar and Lucinda by
Peter Carey.

Kavita

Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell came from the famous family of the
Lowells, well-known among the Boston Brahmins. Their upper class snobbery was
written up in a piece of doggerel asserting the right pecking order:

And this is good old Boston,

The home of the bean and the cod,

Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,

And the Cabots talk only to God.

One brother was Percival Lowell who set up the
Lowell observatory in Arizona and advanced the theory that the Martian surface
was covered with ‘canals’ that might indicate there was water there once.
Another brother became President of Harvard.

She was a writer of free verse and sonnets, and
doggedly advanced her career and ensured the publication of her poems by the
poetry magazines. She defined free verse as built upon 'organic rhythm,' and
said the basis of free verse is “the rhythm of the speaking voice with its
necessity for breathing, rather than upon a strict metrical system. Free verse
within its own law of cadence has no absolute rules; it would not be 'free' if
it had.”

She had a colourful lifestyle, smoking cigars and
reputedly took up a lesbian affair with an actress. The unfortunate prejudices of
the time against women’s education prevented her from going to college, but she
made up for it by avid reading.

She has many collections of verse, and translations
too. Using her wealth she supported the publication of the ‘Imagist Poets.’ The
Imagist movement was originally championed by Ezra Pound. She was awarded a
Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1926, a year after her death, for the collection What's O'Clock.

KumKum

Stephen Dunn

Stephen Dunn is an American modern poet. He was born in 1939 in New York City.

Dunn's entry into the world of poetry was rather circuitous. After school, he entered University on a basketball scholarship. He began his career as an ad-man, then tried to write a novel. Along the way, he also earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. Once he found his true calling, there was no looking back. He published more than a dozen books of poems. Some won him awards and recognition. Different Hours, the book of poems he published in 2000, won the Pulitzer Prize. I have selected two poems from this book to read today.

Dunn's poems talk about simple things, everyday affairs, very much about American ordinary, middle class people and their struggles and joys.

KumKum liked the thoughts in the second poem she
read, Our Parents, which ends:

Our parents, meanwhile, must have wanted something

back from us. We know what it is, don't we?

We've been alive long enough.

Ankush referred to it as the ‘sweetness of poetry.’
Its simplicity is deceptive. He referred to this as a ‘Wastelandish’ kind of
poem, but what mood of T.S. Eliot’s poems this evoked in Ankush is not clear.
Esther thought that parents often put on the TV and need that as a background
noise in their lives, not listening to the programme really. Perhaps we’ll all
be like that, thought Joe. Ankush relished the play of memory in the reference to
the honeymoon enjoyed in Havana by the poet’s parents.

Esther

Tishani Doshi with KumKum at the Hay Festival in T'puram in Nov 2010

Esther offered three poets rather than one. The
lovely Tishani Doshi, dancer, novelist (one novel, The Pleasure Seekers), and poet, was read first. She was chosen to
represent India in a poetry festival in London in connection with the Olympics
in 2012. See

She claims: …
there is no love /without music /No rain /without peacocks. At one point
the poem becomes shaped, words falling vertically, one per line, like drops.
Such effects come easily to the higher artistic temperament. Ankush said the
fact she is a dancer makes the poem very ‘physical.’

Anjum Hasan at the Chennai Lit Fest

Anjum Hasan the author of the second poem also
writes about water in a reverie and conveys the wetness and damp of a day in
the city. She is on the staff of the Caravan
magazine, and appears at literary festivals.

The third poem is by Sumana Roy, a poet from a
small town in W. Bengal. She repeats lines such as these with perfect abandon:

Rain,

tell me that I’m a thud

on your translucent skin.

Ankush

Mamang Dai

Mamang Dai (MD) was born in Pasighat,
Arunachal Pradesh. She opted out of Indian Administrative Services to pursue
journalism and writing. Her works include Arunachal
Pradesh – The Hidden Land (Winner of the state’s first Verrier Elwin
Prize), River Poems, Mountain Harvest
and The Legends of Pensam. She has
also written two books for children, The
Sky Queen and Once Upon a Mountain.
She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2011.

She celebrates both the mystic as well
as the commonplace that nature radiates in her poems; exploring myths behind
the ‘forces of nature’, and thus leading the reader to ecological forests and
magic drum beats. Mountains form a leitmotif of several of her poems, and they
lead us to ancient myths and rich tribal folklore. Her poetry also emanates
from a romanticism and mythopoeic vision that strives to, and succeeds to a
striking extent, in representing the geographical surroundings of her native
place as an extension of the collective psyche of the people. Moreover, her
poems are not just impassive witnesses to the existential despair of men and
women, but a living presence for the aspirations of a marginalized common
people.

MD
appeared at the Chennai Lit Fest. She has written books for children. Her poems
seem to capture time in the mountains, said Ankush. Often the literature of the
NE of India is typed as ‘conflict literature’ on account of the problems
connected with the Army and insurgency, but MD’s poems capture the lives and
aspirations of the common people. She expresses love for the land, and between
men and women. Ankush said she deals in the three poems he chose with small
things from an ‘existential’ standpoint, whatever that means.

Joe
noted a persistent strain of melancholy in all these poems, as though MD was
very sad, but could not come right out and say what made her sad:

I am the woman lost in translation

Who survives, with happiness to carry on.

Ankush
characterised the second poem (The Voice
of the Mountain) as being ‘Sisyphean,’ living and struggling, living and
struggling. The poem sets out the all-knowing experience of the mountain

In the end the universe yields nothing

except a dream of permanence.

…

I am the place where memory escapes

the myth of time,

The grimness of the poems that Joe noted is
attributed by Ankush to the ULFA (one of the insurgent movements in the NE) and
its consequences for the lives of ordinary folk. The poems have the loss of
innocence motif when the insurgency happened. Irom Sharmila, the lady who
wished to fast to death to protest the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (licence
to kill without judicial inquiry), but whom the GOI has kept alive by cruelly
force-feeding her through her nose, has written poems like these. A more
explicit picture emerges of song-writing in the NE from a work, now in London,
called The Bitter Wormwood. The name
of Easterine Kire from was mentioned in this context:

Sunil said there are two sides of the coin to this
conflict. Joe replied this is a conflict that has only one side, a story of
power being used against the powerless who simply want to get on with their
lives without the intervention of the heavy hand of the North and South Blocks
in Delhi. A little argument ensued which was quickly set aside in favour of
pursuing poetry peacefully.

Joe

Sinéad
Morrissey

Sinéad
Morrissey recently won the T.S Eliot prize
for her fifth collection, Parallax.
Her previous collections were all
shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Award and her work has received numerous prizes
including the Patrick Kavanagh Award (at age 18), the Michael Hartnett Prize
and theIrish Times/Poetry
Now Award. In 2007 her poem Through the
Square Window, which contrasts an image of the dead gathering outside a
window with that of a child sleeping peacefully indoors, won the National
Poetry competition.

Morrissey was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and grew up in
Belfast. She was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and has travelled widely
and lived in Japan and New Zealand before returning to her birthplace in 1999.
In 2002 she was appointed Writer in Residence at Queen’s University Belfast,
and she is currently Reader in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for
Poetry at Queen’s.

She
has a young son and daughter by her husband Joseph Pond, an acupuncturist and
hypnotherapist from Arizona, whom she describes as "my main reader and
critic and also my greatest single inspiration." Her mother was an
Anglican, and her father a Catholic, (both members of the Communist party in the
early days of her childhood); they instilled in her an anti-sectarian feeling,
which comes through in her poems. She is close to both her parents, who are
divorced long since.

She
has a special affinity for Belfast and the Lough on which it borders, a stretch
of an enclosed bay which she sees from the back of her house, and has written
many poems about.

For a couple of poems Joe has provided links on Youtube
where the poet may be heard reciting her poems. Her voice is young and almost
girlish.

Preeti

William Butler Yeats

Preeti chose Yeats. She was a little worried, not being
an acolyte of poetry. Joe said, not to worry, for many have entered the list of
KRG thus and been converted.

Yeats’ many themes encompass folklore, love,
fantasy and ghosts. He had an interest in spiritualism too. The felt influence
of India came through Mohini Chatterjee, a Theosophist. In the first poem an
Indian talks to his love, and talks to his god. Preeti mentioned a long
dramatic poem called Anusaya Vidya.

In the first poem (The Indian To His Love) the poet invites his love to come and live
with him on a fantasy island. It has the echo of Marlowe’s 1599 poem, The Passionate Pilgrim:

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove

That hills and valleys, dale and field,

And all the craggy mountains yield.

The second poem, which every disappointed lover
should memorise, has wonderful lines like these:

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

The romantic interpretation is that this is
addressed to Maud Gonne, the fiery Irish nationalist, who told Yeats he was
better off as a poet chasing his fancies, than being tied down by the demands
of marriage. KumKum recited it last July at a poetry session, along with some
unpublished poems of Yeats that came to light in a bequest recently. See:

The third poem, A
Drinking Song, is easily memorised and could be used as a toast to a boyfriend or
girlfriend, recited briskly, ending with a slow drawn out voice,
chanting:

I lift the glass to my mouth,

I look at you, and I sigh.

Sunil

Thomas Wyatt

While searching for poems on
poemhunter.com Sunil came across this poem of Thomas Wyatt, who also figures in
Hilary Mantel’s historical fiction, Wolf
Hall. That’s a book he had suggested for KRG, but belongs to type we do not
read.

Thomas Wyatt was a lover of Anne Boleyn,
so it is rumoured. You can read more about this courtier and English poet at
his wiki

He was one of those responsible for importing
the Italian sonnet in Petrarch’s form to England, where it flourished and
metamorphosed into the famous Elizabethan form used by Shakespeare and his
contemporaries. Since the poem is not clear, and uses the mask of animal terms
to deal with a man and his lover, it might be well to provide a gloss:

It would seem the woman takes the
dominant role at first in their relationship. It is strange to come across a term like ‘newfangleness’
in a poem from 400 years ago; but according to a critic it means, “the
propensity of human beings to seek new objects to love, to change loves, by
unfaithfulness and, by extension, promiscuity in the quest of the new.” For a
recitation of this poem seehttp://www.dailymotion.com/video/x12tltj_sir-thomas-wyatt-they-flee-from-me_creation

Such lines as these tug at the heartstrings:

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small;

Therewithall sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, 'dear heart, how like you this?'

What would you reply to this invitation as a
diligent KRG reader? – to be done in two couplets, as an exercise and sent to
Joe. Here are the results of four readers' imagination submitted by Feb 15, 2015:

What would you reply to this invitation as a
diligent KRG reader? – to be done in two couplets, as an exercise and sent to
Joe.

Ankush’s Response

Smiling, she said, "there is no poetry in love, my dear.

You'd rather pick your Quixotic self and scamper from here.

See, there comes the Bull, I, "my hubby" call,

He doesn't like poetry, or the gown from my shoulder to fall."

KumKum’s ResponseThough surprised by the delectable fall

Of the gown he could not re-install,

He said: “enfold me in your lingerie,

Don't snap me out of my reverie.”

Mathew’s ResponseWouldst I not say that none better kist

As timorous I am of thy fist?

And your limbs being great and big

I cannot say I care a fig!!

Joe’s ResponseOh this, is bliss, beyond my reckoning,

Your gown I couldn’t prevent descending,

Disrobed, the sight unmanned me quite,

— What came in view was outta sight!

The second poem, a sonnet in the Petrarchan form (Whoso List To Hunt, I Know Where Is An Hind)
is not about deer hunting at all. Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII (Caesar in this
poem) are the subjects , and Wyatt’s continuing youthful fascination for the
lady. Anne ‘fleeth,’ resisting his advances. Notice how pronunciations have
changed over time; ‘wind’ rhymes with ‘mind’ and ‘am’ with ‘tame.’ Wyatt leaves off the
chase with these touching words: